“Tribal knowledge” is information that should be written down but
isn’t. If it were easy to write down, it probably already would be!
Another common problem is with documentation quickly becoming obsolete.
This month we’ll see a specific technique for helping a specific area of
“tribal knowledge”. Our business processes run in phases according to
the calendar. We’ll use the fact that we have a spring season followed
by tournaments as our example. Our tournament software assumes the
regular season has finished. That makes sense for the production
software but can be a problem when developing a feature during the
off-season. The software configuration may not be correct for that
feature to work in that developer’s environment. What setup is needed to
make feature development possible? That’s something we don’t have
written down! Here’s a solution. by Edward Barnard